Employment Gap Research Articles

The Gender Employment Gap among Refugees and the Role of Employer Discrimination: Experimental Evidence from the German, Swedish and Austrian Labor Markets

Compared to their male counterparts, refugee women exhibit low employment rates in many countries. Discrimination by recruiters could possibly explain this phenomenon, but thus far, there is little direct evidence on this. This study addresses this gap. We develop a set of hypotheses about the effects of gender and family status on refugees’ labor market integration, and then test these hypotheses using data from an original survey experiment administered in 2019 to online panels of recruiters in three major refugee-receiving countries (Germany, Austria, and Sweden). We find that recruiters indeed prefer female over male refugees across different job types, all else equal. However, we also find evidence of a disadvantage connected with motherhood among refugees. Overall, our findings raise doubts about the relevance of discrimination as an explanation for the observed employment gap between male and female refugees.

Reducing discrimination against job seekers with and without employment gaps.

Past research shows that decision-makers discriminate against applicants with career breaks. Career breaks are common due to caring responsibilities, especially for working mothers, thereby leaving job seekers with employment gaps on their résumés. In a preregistered audit field experiment in the United Kingdom (n = 9,022), we show that rewriting a résumé so that previously held jobs are listed with the number of years worked (instead of employment dates) increases callbacks from real employers compared to résumés without employment gaps by approximately 8%, and with employment gaps by 15%. A series of lab studies (an online pilot and two preregistered experiments; n = 2,650) shows that this effect holds for both female and male applicants-even when compared to applicants without employment gaps-as well as and for applicants with less and more total job experience. The effect is driven by making the applicant's job experience salient, not as a result of novelty or ease of reading.

Parental Leave Policy and Long-run Earnings of Mothers

Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women’s employment rates but to decrease their wages in case of extended leave duration. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers’ long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested benefit with a more generous earnings-related benefit that is granted for a shorter period of time. Additionally, a ”daddy quota” of two months was introduced. To identify the causal effect of this policy mix on long-run earnings of mothers, we use a difference-in-differences approach that compares labor market outcomes of mothers who gave birth just before and right after the reform and nets out seasonal effects by including the year before. Using administrative social security data, we confirm previous findings and show that the average duration of employment interruptions increased for mothers with high pre-birth earnings. Nevertheless, we find a positive long-run effect on earnings for mothers in this group. This effect cannot be explained by changes in the selection of working mothers, working hours or changes in employer stability. Descriptive evidence suggests that the stronger involvement of fathers, incentivized by the ”daddy months”, could have facilitated mothers’ re-entry into the labor market and thereby increased earnings. For mothers with low pre-birth earnings, however, we do not find beneficial long-run effects of this parental leave reform.

Assessing the role of gender in hiring: a field experiment on labour market discrimination.

The under-representation of females within the labour market, particularly in managerial roles, has sparked a local and global debate on whether women, mostly mothers, face negative discrimination. This study distinctly adopts a field experiment methodology to investigate the presence of gender discrimination and the motherhood penalty against higher education (Bachelor, Master's, and Doctoral degree) females seeking full-time employment in the labour market at the initial stage of the recruitment process, being the call-back to the interview. This study took place in Malta, which was characterised by a low unemployment figure, complemented by strong economic growth at the time, thus enabling a proper analysis of the possible presence of gender-based discrimination even when labour demand is high. Field experiments were chosen as the methodology. This involved sending pairs of fictitious job applications belonging to two fictional male and female candidates (identical to each other except for the demographic characteristics) in response to job vacancies. Then, the employers' behaviour was recorded to assess whether they engaged in discriminatory practices. The analysis of the replies through the use of econometric models shows that there is no statistically significant evidence that employers engage in discrimination at the call-back stage of the recruitment process. Furthermore, during this distribution period, no particular age class was favoured or discriminated against, a finding that contradicts the idea that young female workers are discriminated against due to their maternal responsibilities. Such a study contributes to the growing literature on the subject, by being the first study done in Malta to scientifically test whether the significant gender employment gap present in various industries in Malta is attributed to negative discrimination against women or mothers with young children.

“It Is Here We Are Loved”: Rural Place Attachment in Active Judging and Access to Justice

In the United States, rural economic marginalization and corresponding gaps in employment, affordable housing, health care, nutrition, and education put individuals at high risk for legal need. Yet many rural regions are “legal deserts” with few, if any, attorneys, and prevailing access-to-justice initiatives tend to neglect the unique challenges posed by rurality. The efforts of rural tribal and state court judges, though often overlooked in scholarship and policy, offer a compelling response to this inequitable access-to-justice context. Building on emergent work on “active judging,” or when judges step away from a traditional passive role to assist unrepresented parties, this manuscript explores how rural place and place attachments shape diverse judges’ interactions with litigants. It draws on mixed-methodological research across seven tribal and state courts in the upper Midwest to shed light on rural judges’ efforts, how these efforts are regarded by unrepresented parties, and to what extent a shared experience of rurality provides a meaningful form of “access.” In so doing, it offers a novel spatial intervention in scholarship on access to justice and active judging and contributes to more rurally relevant justice practices.

The labor market integration of Syrian refugees in Turkey

Although Turkey hosts the largest population of refugees globally, we know little about their labor-market outcomes at the national level. This study uses the 2018 round of the Turkey Demographic and Health Survey, which includes a representative sample of Syrian refugees for the first time, to examine refugee labor-market integration. The findings show a much smaller native–refugee gap in men’s employment in Turkey (favoring natives) than that reported for most developed countries. Moreover, the employment rate for refugee men peaks quite early, one year after arrival, and remains at the same level. By contrast, the employment rate for refugee women is initially lower and does not change much over time. Once demographic and educational differences are accounted for, the native–refugee gap in men’s (women’s) paid employment falls to 4.7 (4.0) percentage points (pp). These small gaps conceal the fact that formal-employment rates are much lower among refugees. Even when covariate differences are accounted for, the formal-employment rate for refugee men is 58 pp lower than the rate for native men. In addition, the smallest native–refugee employment gaps are in manufacturing for men and agriculture for women. The gap is also much smaller in wage employment than in self-employment or unpaid family work. Finally, significant heterogeneity exists across refugee groups. The native–refugee employment gap is wider for older and more-educated groups. Once covariates are accounted for, the gap in men’s employment vanishes for refugees whose mother tongue is Turkish but persists for refugees whose mother tongue is Arabic or Kurdish.

Unequal effects of the COVID-19 epidemic on employment: Differences by immigrant status and race/ethnicity.

The COVID-19 epidemic resulted in a dramatic contraction in employment in the U.S., but the effects of this contraction have been unevenly distributed. We examine differences in employment among foreign- and native-born workers by race/ethnicity during the course of the epidemic. We test individual fixed-effects models based on data from the monthly CPS panel from January 2020 to December 2021 adjusting for seasonality. Immigrant men and women experienced greater declines in employment than non-immigrants of the same race/ethnicity when both compared to native-born Whites, but their disadvantage were limited to the initial months of the epidemic. Ethnoracial and immigrant status disparities were substantially reduced by the fall of 2020, except for Hispanic immigrant men and women, who still experienced substantial employment gaps with their native-born White counterparts. Differences in family characteristics account for Hispanic immigrant women's lower employment rates during the epidemic but do not appear to account for differences between Black and Asian women and native-born Whites. Observed disparities in employment by race/ethnicity and immigrant status cannot be fully explained by differences in education, the concentration of minority and immigrant workers in industries and occupations that suffered steeper employment declines, or regional differences in the intensity of the epidemic.

Migration and Women Empowerment in India: An Overview of Pattern of Female Migration, its Causes and Consequences

Trend and pattern of migration reveal socio-economic condition of the population. In India, pattern and level of internal migration among males and females are quite different. The reasons of migration among females are entirely different from those of males. Gender gap in employment and empowerment is manifested by the strikingly different pattern of migration among female and male population.

Adult Worker Model Typologies: Examining Work-Family Policies in Fifteen European Countries.

This article aims to advance the discussion of government policies for improving women's work and family life. It focuses on exploring whether it is reasonable to expect that the supported adult worker model will play an important role in guiding governments to reduce the gender employment gap and, at the same time, increase women's resources for strengthening their control over family and work life. This model posits that governments should take a proactive approach to encouraging women to take part in formal employment, such as providing care support measures. To examine the impact of the model, this article develops an 'input adult worker model typology' and an 'output adult worker model typology' using cluster analysis of comparative data covering 15 countries. The findings show that it is important not to overestimate the impact of the supported adult worker model on reducing the gender employment gap or increasing women's control over their lives in most of the 15 countries. The evidence generated from these typologies highlights the difficulties involved in promoting women's welfare despite the use of the adult worker model as a substitute for the male-breadwinner model.

Why making promotion after a burnout is like boiling the ocean

Abstract Recent studies have explored hiring discrimination as an obstacle to former burnout patients. A substantial share of the burned-out working population, however, returns to the same employer, where they face an even more severe aftermath of burnout syndrome: promotion discrimination. To our knowledge, we are the first to directly address this issue. More specifically, we conducted a vignette experiment with 406 managers, testing the potential of the main burnout stigma theoretically described in the literature as potential mediators of promotion discrimination. Estimates reveal that compared to employees without an employment interruption, former burnout patients are assigned a 34 per cent lower promotion propensity score. Moreover, negative perceptions are associated with a history of job burnout. Four of these perceptions, namely lower leadership capacities, stress tolerance, abilities to take on an exemplary role, and chances of finding another job explain almost half the burnout effect on promotion propensities.

The gender gap in top jobs – The role of overconfidence

There is a large gender gap in the probability of being in a “top job” in mid-career. Top jobs bring higher earnings, and also have more job security and better career trajectories. Recent literature has raised the possibility that some of this gap may be attributable to women not “leaning in” while men are more overconfident in their abilities. We use longitudinal data from childhood into mid-career and construct a measure of overconfidence using multiple measures of objective cognitive ability and subjective estimated ability. Our measure confirms previous findings that men are more overconfident than women. We then use linear regression and decomposition techniques to account for the gender gap in top jobs including our measure of overconfidence. Our results show that men being more overconfident explains 5–11 percent of the gender gap in top job employment. This indicates that while overconfidence matters for gender inequality in the labor market and has implications for how firms recruit and promote workers, other individual, structural, and societal factors play a larger role.

New Canadians Working amid a New Normal: Recent Immigrant Wage Penalties in Canada during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has exposed and arguably intensified many existing inequalities. This analysis explores the relationship between recent immigrant earnings and the pandemic. Specifically, we attempt to empirically answer the question "Has the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated (or mitigated) recent immigrant-non-immigrant employment and wage gaps?" We find that the pandemic did not change the labour force activity profile of recent or long-term immigrants. Moreover, the pandemic did not disproportionately disadvantage recent immigrants' earnings. In fact, recent immigrant men who were employed during the COVID-19 crisis experienced a small but statistically significant earnings premium. This was insufficient, however, to overcome the overall earnings discount associated with being a recent immigrant. In addition, we find that the recent immigrant COVID-19 earnings boost is observable only at and below the median of the earnings distribution. We also use Heckman selection correction to attempt to adjust for unobserved sample selection into employment during the pandemic. The fact that COVID-19 has not worsened recent immigrant earnings gaps should not overshadow the large, recent immigrant earnings disparities that existed before the pandemic and continue to exist regardless of the COVID-19 crisis.

Resilience and entrepreneurial intentions of people with disabilities: in search of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Background: There is a significant gap in employment between people with and without disabilities, despite the importance of work in achieving their independence, autonomy, and integration into society. There are several reasons that cause this gap to exist, such as: people with disabilities feel less prepared, there is a stigma or discrimination to hire people with disabilities and the incompatibility of schedules due to medical issues, among others. That is why entrepreneurship emerges as a good option for the integration of people with disabilities in our society, improves their confidence and promotes some of the Sustainable Development Goals set out in the 2030 Agenda. According to existing literature, people with disabilities have certain virtues such as resilience and motivation that favor entrepreneurship. Thus, the purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the variables that determine the entrepreneurial intention of people with disabilities. Methods: In order to respond to this objective, an online questionnaire was given to people with disabilities between the ages of 16 and 65 years, residing in diverse regions of Spain. To analyze the results, this study uses Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) in a sample of 235 people with disabilities in Spain using as a framework Krueger´s improved model, adding resilience as a new variable. Results: The results reflect the importance of resilience, the subjective norm, and perceived collective efficacy in the entrepreneurial processes of people with disabilities. Conclusions: This study contributes to the underdeveloped literature on entrepreneurship in people with disabilities; it provides insights that can have a practical effect on the reduction of the inequality gap between people with and without disabilities making recommendations to clinicians, vocational psychologists, and policymakers; also, this study would advance the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 10.

The Relationship between Gender Gap in Employment and Hofstede’s Culture Dimensions depending on Country Scores

Why is there a significant gender gap in the global labor force participation? Is there a way to reduce vulnerable employment? May cultural values explain the gender gap in employment and male-dominant work structure? This research examined the associations between Hofstede’s culture dimensions (including power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation) and gender gap in employment indicators (women’s and men’s labor force participation and vulnerable employment rates) after controlling the economy. Secondary data were obtained from Hofstede’s culture dimensions and World Bank databases. When the countries with missing data are excluded, remaining data of 60 countries make up the data set of the study. Two-step hierarchical regression analyses were performed, in which economic development was entered in the first step and study variables were included in the model in the second step. The main results indicated that after controlling economic development, women’s labor force participation rate was negatively related to country scores on uncertainty avoidance. In contrast, men’s labor force participation rate was negatively associated with country scores on power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance. Besides, both women’s and men’s vulnerable employment rates were negatively related to country scores on individualism. The fact that more women and men participate in the labor force in countries with low power distance and uncertainty avoidance can be interpreted as women’s labor force participation creates new job opportunities that both women and men benefit from. The results may be useful for researchers who aim to see the current gender-based labor force participation patterns in different countries and understand the culture dynamics of economic gender gap. 

Driving, Residential Location, and Employment Outcomes Among Older Adults.

The ability to drive is positively associated with workforce participation among older adults. However, residence in neighborhoods where destinations are easy to reach by public transit could potentially narrow the employment gap between older drivers and non-drivers. This study examines the relationship between driving, residential location characteristics, and employment outcomes among older adults. Findings show that both drivers and non-drivers are more likely to be employed if they live in neighborhoods with high levels of access to jobs via public transit. However, the positive relationship between transit access to jobs and employment outcomes is particularly strong among non-drivers. These findings indicate that although older adult drivers are more likely to work than their non-driving counterparts, the gap in employment outcomes is mitigated by living in dense, transit-rich neighborhoods. Results suggest that policies supporting both automobile access and transit-rich residential environments can facilitate labor force participation among older adults.

COVID-19 and Gender Gaps in Employment, Wages, and Work Hours: Lower Inequalities and Higher Motherhood Penalty.

This paper investigates the dynamics and drivers of gender gaps in employment rates, wages, and work hours during the COVID-19 pandemic, relying on Estonian Labor Force Survey data for 2009–2020. We document that the pandemic has, if anything, reduced gender inequality in all three domains. The evolution of inequalities revealed cyclical pattern mirroring infection rate, with upswings largely driven by parenthood and gender segregation into industries. The results suggest that labor market penalties for women with young children and women employed in affected sectors may last longer than the pandemic, threatening to widen gender inequality in a long run.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41294-022-00198-z.

Gender and vulnerable employment in the developing world: Evidence from global microdata

This paper investigates gender inequality in vulnerable employment: forms of employment typically featuring high precariousness, inadequate earnings, and lack of decent working conditions. Using a large collection of harmonized household surveys from developing countries, we measure long-term trends, describe geographical patterns, and estimate correlates of gender inequalities in vulnerable employment. Conditional on individual and household characteristics, women are 7 percentage points more likely to be in vulnerable employment than men. The experiences of marriage and parenthood are important drivers of this gender gap. Across countries, the gender gap is smaller in richer countries, with lower fertility rates, and more gender-egalitarian laws, particularly those laws regulating marriage, parenthood, access to assets, and access to entrepreneurship. Since the 1990s, rising levels of female education and rapidly falling fertility have pulled women away from vulnerable employment at a faster rate than men. However, that process is largely exhausted, with current levels of the gender gap in vulnerable employment being almost entirely unexplained by standard labour supply factors.

Mothers’ caregiving during COVID: The impact of marital property laws on women’s labor force status

If mothers take care of children more than fathers, then after the onset of COVID-19 mothers’ employment is expected to drop more than that of fathers. This gender gap is likely to be larger where women are less concerned about the financial repercussions of opting out of the labor force, and therefore the gender gap in employment is likely to grow more where community property or homemaking provisions give more protection to homemakers in case of union dissolution. Difference-in-differences and dynamic study estimations applied to CPS data for 2019–2020 show that after the onset of COVID-19 the labor force participation of mothers of school-age children—but not of fathers--dropped more in states with marital property laws more generous to parental caregivers. These results stand in contrast to how these groups’ labor force participation changed after the Great Recession, compared to pre-recession levels.

The Contribution of Girls’ Longer Hours in Unpaid Work to Gender Gaps in Early Adult Employment: Evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam

Across many countries, girls perform more unpaid work than boys. This article shows how the time young women and girls spend in unpaid household work contributes to the gender pay gap that is already evident by age 22. The study analyzes employment participation, type of employment, and wages using five waves of the Young Lives longitudinal survey for Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. Spending longer hours in unpaid household work in adolescence positively predicts later employment participation but has a scarring effect in negatively predicting job quality (that is a job with a private or public organization) and hourly earnings, particularly for women. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of the gender wage gap show young women’s penalty for past household work is due to longer hours of such work rather than a higher penalty for women for a given amount of unpaid work. HIGHLIGHTS Participation in unpaid household work and paid work is gendered from a young age. Time in unpaid household work as children impacts young adults’ employment. Time in household work in adolescence is linked to lower job quality in adulthood. Girls’ longer hours in household work contribute to the gender wage gap. Girls spend less time than boys in play or leisure at all ages.

Import Competition and the Gender Employment Gap in China

Import Competition and the Gender Employment Gap in China